The Fence - Dick Lehr [27]
For high school Kenny wanted to follow his pal Mike Doyle, who was a year ahead of him, to the Don Bosco Preparatory High School in Boston. Never a star academically, Kenny went to summer school in 1982 so he could get in. He took courses in English and math. It worked. He began attending the Catholic school in September, catching the number 9 bus each morning at the corner of H Street and East Broadway for the ride through Southie and across the bridge into downtown Boston.
The extra effort may have gotten Kenny into Don Bosco, but starting out he was at best a mediocre student. Freshman year he got mostly low B’s and C’s. Then during sophomore year Kenny began to click—his grades improved steadily. That year and the next he earned mostly B’s and A’s. He peaked his senior year, both in class and on the playing fields. He played varsity basketball and football, and his grades were so strong he made the National Honor Society. “It felt good being able to come home having a 100 on an exam,” Kenny said. His perfect grades—100s across the board—in his religion class earned him the Religion Award at graduation in the spring of 1987. He also was named a Golden Bear, one of the school’s highest honors, awarded for character and leadership. The previous year’s Golden Bear was none other than Mike Doyle.
The awards left Kenny feeling a little dizzy. To be sure, he enjoyed them, but he was not used to the attention and did not consider himself “an awards or medals guy.” Glory-seeking was not what made him tick; instead, like his mother, he was a “doer.” Kenny Conley saw himself as one of the guys who got the job done without fanfare.
Kenny was coming of age in the long aftermath of busing and shifting sands in his hometown—namely gentrification. Slowly, young professionals were discovering the neighborhood’s proximity to downtown, its sea breezes, and its water views. But even as the outsiders arrived, Southie’s public image remained largely negative. The tumult of busing in the mid-1970s might have long subsided, but Southie had been scarred deeply.
“Although the crisis over busing was a relatively brief episode in South Boston’s 300-year history,” the historian Thomas H. O’Connor wrote, “it was an unusually bitter and violent period that stereotyped the neighborhood forever in the minds of people throughout the nation as a place where beer-bellied men and foulmouthed women made war on defenseless black children.” The stereotype was ripe for exploitation and would be used against Southie—the sense of loyalty made into a vice, not a virtue.
Kenny would someday experience this firsthand. But in 1987 he was riding on his own modest-sized version of cloud nine. Following the strong finish at Don Bosco, he spent the summer hanging out with friends, driving a delivery truck, and enjoying himself. He lived at home and had few expenses. His parents’ marriage was unraveling, but they had stayed friends. Kenny began playing basketball in a new adult CYO league at Gatie. One of the other teams, called the Evans Club, consisted of the Evans brothers, including Paul, a high-ranking officer in the police department who was twenty years older than Kenny and eventually became police commissioner during the 1990s.
Kenny also was accepted into Suffolk University in Boston. He registered for classes and lined up financial aid and grants. But when September rolled around, Kenny was a no-show. “I just didn’t want to go.” He decided he’d had enough of school and was talking to his father and Uncle Russ about the Boston Police Department. With their guidance, he filled out an application. He took a police cadet exam. Then, one day in November 1987, Kenny got the call to be a cadet, the first step in his dream of becoming a full-fledged police officer. Kenny was told to report for duty on December 5, 1987—six days before he turned nineteen. Mike Doyle was also accepted into the cadet program.
Kenny’s first assignment was working in the traffic division. He was on the job only two months when tragedy